Posts Tagged ‘michael weiss’
How to stop state terrorists: seize their assets
The most effective method of hurting those who murder their own people is to recover the wealth they have amassed.
The guards who tortured Sergei Magnitsky at Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina prison, and refused to allow doctors to treat the pancreatitis that eventually killed him did not understand that they had fashioned a weapon for democracies to wield against dictatorships.
Until that moment, on 16 November 2009, all the talk of globalisation had missed one obvious fact – the wealthy could indeed move their money across national borders in ways that were once unimaginable. However corrupt a communist was in the cold war, his wealth had to stay in the old Soviet Union or in China or eastern Europe. From 1991 on, oligarchs or red princelings could hide their money where they wanted.
But the options for those who robbed or murdered their own people were not limitless. They did not stash their loot in their own countries, as a rule. They feared revolutionaries taking power and taking back the stolen goods. They could direct wealth to Russia, the new capital of global reaction. But trusting the Putin regime and Russia’s corrupt banking system and judiciary has never been wise. Instead, they wanted what oligarchs and the willing servants of dictatorial regimes have always wanted: a town house in Mayfair, an apartment in Manhattan or a villa on the Riviera, where they could be safe; and City, Swiss or Wall Street lawyers and bankers, who could protect their wealth. The democratic world was their bolt hole and pension plan.
On Thursday night, Ukrainian liberals and journalists reported that private jets were taking off from Ukraine as fears grew – and let us hope they are not groundless – that President Yanukovych and his death squads were entering their last days. The charter manifest at Kiev’s Zhulyany airport on 20 February, said one, read like a Who’s Who of Ukraine’s richest men. Which way would they head – east or west? As far as Ukraine’s planespotters could tell, they wanted to head west to countries with the rule of law and protections for private property, rather than east into the hands of the rapacious Putin and his officials.
Just like the families of Chinese communists, who store their wealth in the British Virgin Islands, when the moment of choice comes, they prefer financial security to ideological conformity. For instance, one of Ukraine’s richest men has paid more than £100m for a luxury apartment in London. We should not be surprised if such men decide to delight us with their company if the old regime falls and its unreasonable replacement takes against them.
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The Rise and Probable Fall of Putin’s Enforcer
On June 4 2012, Russian reporter Sergei Sokolov was part of a press delegation accompanying the three-year-old Investigative Committee, often described as Russia’s FBI, on a trip to Kabardino-Balkaria, a republic in the Caucasus. Sokolov’s publication, Novaya Gazeta, is one of the few independent newspapers left in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a fact ominously borne out by the five journalists who have been removed from its masthead by being murdered — among them, Anna Politkovskaya. So the 59-year-old head of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, might have expected a less-than-friendly audience in Sokolov, who had indeed already filed a blistering dispatch about the Committee’s bungled investigation into the murder of 12 people, including four children, in Kushchevskaya, a village in the Krasnodar region, which took place in 2010. Krasnodar is notorious for its gang violence and Sokolov was particularly incensed about what had happened to Sergei Tsepovyaz, a local state official who’d destroyed evidence in the case and whose brother was a known member of the gang that perpetrated the killings: the brother got off with a $5,000 fine. Sokolov not unreasonably alleged a state coverup and named Bastrykin and Putin as “servants” of Krasnodar gangsters. After being cornered by his quarry in Kabardino-Balkaria, however, the journalist apologized for some of his prior coverage, but Russia’s top cop was neither appeased nor amused. “I consider myself insulted,” Bastrykin replied, “and not just personally. In czarist times they would have called people out to duel over this.”
A duel wasn’t quite what happened next. The delegation, including Sokolov, returned safely to Moscow. Nine days later, on June 13, Dmitry Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, published an open letter addressed to Bastrykin, in which he claimed that Bastrykin had threatened to behead and dismember Sokolov:
“Sokolov was placed in a car by your bodyguards. He was taken without any explanation to a forest near Moscow. There, you asked the bodyguards to leave you and remained face to face with Sokolov… The hard truth is that, in your emotional state, you rudely threatened the life of my journalist. And you joked that you would investigate the murder case personally.”
Bastrykin’s initial reaction, in an interview with pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia, was to say that he hadn’t even been in a forest “in years.” All the allegations made in Muratov’s letter, he said, were “outright lies.” However, his denial couldn’t stop an undeniably scandalous story — what Muratov later described as “bad Hollywood” — from gripping the nation’s attention. Five journalists were arrested for picketing outside the Committee’s headquarters in Moscow the day the letter was published. What then followed was unprecedented. Rather than retrench and perhaps lock up Muratov, Bastrykin invited the Novaya Gazeta editors to a meeting hosted by Interfax, another media outlet, whereupon the Committee chief issued a formal apology to Sokolov, who was by now well out of Russia, fearing for his life. (Sokolov returned a few days later.)
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Ireland Bows to Russia’s Intimidation
If any doubt ever existed that Russia’s newly imposed adoption ban was undertaken not out of genuine concern for the fate of orphans now in the custody of American parents but rather to punish any government that takes a strong line on Russian human rights violators, then recent events in Ireland have just eliminated any such reservations.
On February 27th, Bill Browder, the London-based CEO of Hermitage Capital and the man behind the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which calls for the sanctioning and banning of Russian officials credibly accused of gross human rights abuses, testified before the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Irish Parliament (the Oireachtas). As he’s done in Washington and numerous European capitals before, Browder outlined the facts of how his former attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, uncovered a $230 million tax fraud perpetrated by a Russian organized crime syndicate consisting of Interior Ministry, intelligence, and federal tax officials, who used Hermitage Capital’s corporate documents as cover. Magnitsky himself was then arrested for the crime and tortured to death in pretrial detention; his corpse was found in the Matrosskaya Tishina prison hospital, with his arm handcuffed to a radiator, lying a pool of urine. He is now being tried posthumously in Russia, a legal grotesquerie that not even Stalin had the gall to attempt during the Great Terror. And, unless you’ve not bothered to open a newspaper these past several months, the Magnitsky affair has become the most widely reported human rights scandal in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, as well as the driving force behind the eponymous US law, which Putin yesterday described as “imperial” in design at a four-hour marathon press conference.
Following Browder’s testimony, Irish Senator Jim Walsh, a member of the leading center-right party Fianna Fail, drafted a resolution, modeled on what Britain, Holland, Italy, the Council of Europe, and European Parliament have already done, calling on the Irish government to “publicly list the names, deny visas into Ireland, and freeze any assets found in Ireland” of those Russian officials who “were responsible for the false arrest, torture and death” of Magnitsky, “perpetrated or financially benefited from the crimes” that he “uncovered and exposed, and/or participated in the cover up of those responsible for those crimes.” It further called for the passage of an Irish counterpart legislation to the one the US Congress passed last November, and for EU-wide visa sanctions on those officials named as conspirators or accomplices in the affair. The resolution was co-signed by eight members of the Foreign Affairs committee.
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The Man Behind Putin’s Adoption Ban Once Tried to Investigate Russia’s Spy Agency
Children’s ombudsman Pavel Astakhov is now the face of Putin’s Magnitsky retaliation law, but in a past life he was an anti-FSB advocate.
For a man known as Russia’s Judge Judy, Pavel Astakhov has had more luck causing a diplomatic crisis than any family court judge ever had. Appointed Russia’s child right’s commissioner in 2009 by former President Dmitry Medvedev, Astakhov’s domestic and international profile has risen steadily since, culminating in his patronage of the new state law banning U.S. citizens from adopting Russian orphans and describing his critics as “pedophiles” who are either “blind or stupid.”
The measure is built right into the so-called “Dima Yakovlev Law,” the Duma’s broad answer to the newly passed Magnitsky Act, which blacklists and sanctions Russian officials credibly accused of gross human rights violations. Dima’s Law has been hysterically presented in the Russian state-controlled media as a necessary corrective to a spate of American adoptive parents mistreating or even killing their wards, with Astakhov taking center stage as a Cassandra against the “export” of the some 60,000 native sons and daughters who’ve found homes in the United States since 1991.
Yet Astakhov’s peregrinations from post-Soviet legal eagle and intellectual celebrity into spokesman for Vladimir Putin’s most frivolously nasty anti-American measure is particularly fascinating given the fact that he doesn’t quite fit the prototype of Kremlin flack. He formerly defended Vladimir Gusinsky, the first billionaire oligarch and media mogul to have his empire confiscated by the state, under the direct threat of arrest or worse by a then-new-minted President Putin; he also represented Edmond Pope, an American businessman and retired naval officer, who was convicted of espionage, then pardoned.
Best known for his Court TV-style reality series (where the defendants are played by actors), a constant stream of self-help books on teaching Russians all about property rights, real estate and family law, and another constant stream of Grisham-esque legal thrillers, Astakhov has a Masters of Law from the University of Pittsburgh, making him one of the few top state officials to be partially educated in the United States. (Like most state officials, his eldest son studied in Britain and then New York City.) He was on these shores when al-Qaeda attacked on September 11, and has since taken to referring to America as his “second motherland.” He certainly has favorite holiday destinations. A few months ago, Seven Days magazine (think People) ran a J. Crew ad-cum-puff piece about Astakhov and his attractive family, explaining how his wife Svetlana not only gave birth to their youngest son in Nice, but then had the child baptized in Cannes. In what would have been cosmopolitan heresy for any other Russian official, Astakhov favorably compared the French Riviera’s ob-gyn and neonatal systems to those of his first motherland: “We really had the largest ward in the hospital: three rooms, a parental bedroom, a children’s room and a guest room. But all this, including the medical care, cost three times less than what it would cost in an elite Moscow hospital.” Even the food, he said, was better than back home.
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Corruption and Cover-Up in the Kremlin: The Anatoly Serdyukov Case
At the World Economic Forum at Davos on Wednesday, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was asked the inevitable question about Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian attorney who exposed a $230 million tax fraud perpetrated by organized criminals and Russian state officials, only to then be blamed for the crime himself. He died in prison in 2009, when Medvedev was president, after being tortured and denied medical attention, as Medvedev’s own Presidential Human Rights Council concluded. Magnitsky’s name has since been woven into US human rights law following the passage and presidential signing of a bill that would sanction and blacklist Russians complicit in his persecution as well as any other individuals credibly accused of “gross violations of human rights,” such as, say, Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov. This legislation has driven the Kremlin to paroxysms of anti-American hysteria, culminating in the Duma’s recent ban on American adoptions of Russian orphans.
Nevertheless, the Russian prime minister was unimpressed. Although he professed to feel “pity” for Magnitsky, Medvedev described him as no ” truth seeker,” just “a corporate lawyer or an accountant and he defended the interests of the people who hired him” — a reference to Magnitsky’s former client, William Browder, whose investment fund, Hermitage Capital, was used as the vehicle for transacting the tax fraud. (Browder is almost singlehandedly responsible for turning the plight of his slain lawyer into an international human rights scandal and, consequentially, an American law).
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Keeping the pressure on Putin – Moscow is turning into a bully again
Alex Goldfarb had an idea.
The veteran Russian dissident and longtime New York resident was standing in Union Square when it came to him.
He was there a week ago for an anti-Kremlin rally to protest Russia’s new law banning American adoptions of Russian orphans. It’s an especially vindictive measure that is solely intended to serve as political revenge for recent U.S. legislation that blacklists human rights-abusing Russian officials. Goldfarb, however, was thinking beyond a day’s worth of street theater.
“We should start a campaign to get Mayor Bloomberg to name a street in New York after Pussy Riot,” he said, referring to the feminist punk band made world famous after three of its members were arrested and subjected to a ridiculous show trial for performing a “punk prayer” denouncing Russian President Vladimir Putin in a Moscow cathedral.
Two of the members of Pussy Riot, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, are serving out their two-year sentences in a labor camp. One of the women, Yekaterina Samutsevich, was released in October.
In many ways, that trio has become the face of the protests against Putin’s ineradicable grip on the Kremlin. The three young women turned into an unlikely cause célèbre, with the likes of Madonna and Paul McCartney showing their support.
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Moscow-on-Thames
When most people think of British-Russian relations, they imagine Bond films, iron curtains, Cambridge double agents, irradiated dissidents, and billionaire oligarchs who dress like Evelyn Waugh but behave like Tony Soprano and then sue each other in London courts. But there’s another element underwriting this not-so-special relationship.
British elites, elected or otherwise, have grown highly susceptible to the unscrutinized rubles that continue to pour into the boom-or-boom London real estate market and a luxury-service industry catering to wealthy Russians who are as bodyguarded as they are jet-set. This phenomenon has not only imported some of the worst practices of a mafia state across the English Channel, but it has had a deleterious impact on Britain’s domestic politics. And some of the most powerful and well-connected figures of British public life, from the Rothschilds to former prime ministers, have been taken in by it. Most surprising, though, is how the heirs to Margaret Thatcher’s fierce opposition to the Soviets have often been the ones most easily seduced by the Kremlin’s entreaties.
On Aug. 21, a new lobby group called Conservative Friends of Russia (CFoR) was launched at the London home of Alexander Yakovenko, the Russian ambassador to Britain. The launch was attended by some 250 guests, including parliamentarians, Conservative Party members, businessmen, lobbyists, NGO representatives, and even princes. Yakovenko and Member of Parliament John Whittingdale, who chairs the Culture Select Committee in Parliament and is an “honorary vice president” of CFoR, both delivered keynote addresses. The lavish do in the backyard of the Kremlin envoy featured, as the Guardian reported, a “barbecue, drinks and a raffle, with prizes of vodka, champagne and a biography of Vladimir Putin,” and it came just days after the Pussy Riot verdict. It was an open invitation to controversy. If CFoR wanted to portray itself as merely a promoter of “dialogue” between Britain and Russia, it was an odd beginning for a group born looking and sounding a lot like “Tories for Putin.”
CFoR was founded by Richard Royal, a public affairs manager at Ladbrokes, a popular chain of betting parlors in Britain. He also owns his own company, Lionheart Public Affairs, which has no website but shares a registered address with the new pro-Russia lobby group. Responding to the storm of criticism his new project has provoked, Royal took to the Guardian’s website to defend the initiative against what he called “armchair critics on Twitter,” in language you’d expect from a PR professional. “Whether we like it or not,” Royal wrote, “Russia is an influential and essential part of the international community and its importance will only grow over time. We need to stop making decisions based on misconceptions that are decades old, and deal with reality.”
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Explosive Video Documents Depth of Putin’s Mafia State
World Affairs
Michael Weiss
It is no longer possible to distinguish where organized crime ends and the state begins in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. An extraordinary 17-minute video just exhibited by the anti-corruption website Russian Untouchables shows how an elite crime syndicate headed by a longtime gangster, Dmitry Klyuev, and including active agents of the Russian Interior Ministry and Moscow tax offices, managed to steal close to $1 billion from state coffers in fraudulent tax claims. It was the Klyuev Group that attorney Sergei Magnitsky exposed after one of his clients, Hermitage Capital, was raided and its corporate documents pilfered in order to defraud the Russian state of $230 million in a sham corporate tax refund—a refund which was processed in a single day by the co-conspirators themselves. After Magnitsky exposed it, the Klyuev Group had him framed, tortured, and murdered, then blamed for the crime. The substance of this new video, all obtained through Magnitsky’s relentless legal work and backed by bank, state, and airline records, is both the reason for his death as well as his testament. All the evidence corroborating what Magnitsky uncovered can be accessed at the Russian Untouchables website. What follows is a precis of the film.
Dmitry Klyuev was a petty crook who was hired in 2002 by Igor Sagiryan, the president of Renaissance Capital, one of Moscow’s most prominent investment firms, to act as a “tax advisor who had skills in arranging tax refunds through the Russian court system,” according to another Renaissance executive who testified in court. The scheme involved arranging a refund for a company Renaissance had only recently purchased; it was completed within 6 to 8 months.
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President Obama must stand up for Russia’s dissidents
A network of student presidents from universities around the world, College-100 (or C-100), has done a sterling job of exposing corruption in Russia, producing the video below about the case of Sergei Magnitsky.
To get you up to speed, Mr Magnitsky was a Russian tax attorney who uncovered a $230 million tax fraud perpetrated by corrupt bureaucrats working in league with the FSB (the KGB’s successor agency). Instead of thanking him for his spadework, which might have recompensed the Russian taxpayer, the state allowed the very criminals Mr Magnitsky had exposed to arrest and torture him to death in a gruesome year-long pre-trial detention. Russia is now trying Mr Magnitsky posthumously for the crime no one -not even his jailers – believe he committed.
European parliaments, the House of Commons, the European Union and the United States Congress are all mulling separate forms of legislation to issue travel bans and asset freezes to the 60 known conspirators in Mr Magnitsky’s persecution (the logic being that criminals in Russia like to go abroad to spend their stolen fortunes).
The US Senate bill, sponsored by two-thirds of the Senate, actually threatens to impose sanctions and visa restrictions against anyone from any foreign country credibly accused of “gross human rights violations.” In other words, it’s a universal proscription that might come in handy the next time a lawyer tries to do his job – or smuggles himself into a US embassy.
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